The "at just this moment" simultaneity montage (pp. 654–655)
At just this moment, @1200 meters east and downhill and one level below ground, Ennet House live-in Staff Don Gately lay deeply asleep in his Lone-Rangerish sleeping mask, his snores rattling the deinsulated pipes along his little room’s ceiling.
Context
The montage's opening panel and its whole mechanism in three words: "At just this moment." Mid-way through the Hal/Stice match the narration cuts away and clock-synchronizes seven scattered threads — Gately asleep (hours before he's shot), Poor Tony in his stall, Pemulis in the Pharmacy library, Steeply's sedan, Tavis's scale, Avril unlocatable, Orin in Phoenix — engineered simultaneity held in the reader's hands, the scope line's phrase made form. Carlisle reads the device as "episodic quick-cuts in a film" calling attention to the novel's frequent simultaneity. (The "@1200 meters" is as the text has it.)